This section highlights Arab American poets and works of poetry that the University Library has access to.
A Palestinian American poet and clinical psychologist born in Carbondale, Illinois, and grew up in Kuwait, Oklahoma, Texas, Maine, and Lebanon. She earned a BA from the American University of Beirut and an MA from Columbia University.
Poetry Works:
Suheir Hammad was born in Amman, Jordan, to refugee Palestinian parents. She immigrated with her family to Brooklyn, New York, when she was just five years old. Inspired by poet-performers such as Nikki Giovanni, Hammad has traveled the world reciting her poetry in various venues and universities.
Poetry Works:
Lena Khalaf Tuffaha has lived the experiences of first-generation American, immigrant, and expatriate. She is a poet, essayist, and translator.
Poetry Works:
A writer and performer whose work centers around the confluence between space and memory.
Poetry Works:
Kahlil Gibran was born in 1883 in the village of Bisharri in what is now northern Lebanon but was then Ottoman Syria. He and his family immigrated to the United States in 1895; they were part of the large wave of immigration that took place in the three decades before World War I. Kahlil Gibran was the key figure in a Romantic movement that transformed Arabic literature in the first half of the twentieth century.
Poetry Works:
